NATURE STUDY 



All Night with the 
Stars 



Latitude 42° 



BY 



LOUISE BROWN 

Special Worker, General Educational Committee 
National Board, Young Womens Christian Associations 



Pamphlet 4 



NEW YORK 

THE WOMANS press 

1920 



rgrapA 



7> 



Copyright, 1920, by 

National Board of the Young Womens Christian Associations 

of the United States of America 



MAR 22 i920 

©C1A567250 



j 



PREFACE 

Sleeping out-of-doors has become a joy to so many 
campers that it seems worth while to call attention to the 
nightl} T march of the stars which so well repays observation 
during such nights under the sky. It is not however neces- 
sary to be awake all night to see the sky change. It is 
interesting to see what has happened if one is out at mid- 
night or in the early morning. This pamphlet does not 
attempt to describe the constellations. 1 It aims rather to 
emphasize the apparent motion of the stars, some setting, 
others rising. Few people realize that the same stars 
visible winter evenings can be seen in summer before sun- 
rise and in the fall at midnight. 

The maps for 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. October 19, and 
3 : 30 a.m. October 20, should be used with the text. It will 
be noticed that the map for 11:30 p.m. October 19 is 
equally good for 9 : 30 p.m. November 19, for 7 : 30 p.m. 
December 19 and for 5:30 p.m. January 19. If anyone 
wishes to know what constellations he can see during any 
other night of the year, he can easily tell from the Eve- 
ning Sky Maps. 2 If, for instance, the night chosen is 
August 15, the map for August gives the sky at 8 p.m. 



i William T. Olcott's "A Field Book of the Stars" or Garrett P. 
Serviss' "Astronomy with the Naked Eye" should be used for that 
purpose. 

2 These may be purchased from Leon Barritt, 150 Nassau Street, 
New York. 



August 15; the map for October gives also the sky at 
12 p.m. August 15; the map for December serves for 
4 a.m. August 16. 

The stars mentioned in this pamphlet can be seen all 
winter, as the pamphlet makes clear, rising each night 
earlier. Those described as visible at midnight or in the 
early morning in October can be well seen at more con- 
venient hours in January. The planets mentioned will also 
be in the evening sky in the late winter and spring of 1919. 

Although most people know that the rotation of the 
earth is the cause of the apparent motion of the stars 
about the earth, few realize the difficulties involved in such 
a belief or the evidence on which it rests.. The importance 
of forming the habit of not blindly believing what is said 
but of attempting to understand the argument has led me, 
at the risk of boring some people with figures, to give the 
simplest evidence in support of the belief in the rotation 
of the earth. It must be remembered that those who first 
argued that the great earth moves met with violent per- 
secution. 

''Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 
Breathe cheaply in the common air." 

No attempt is made here to discuss the revolution of the 
earth about the sun, which brings different constellations 
into the evening sky from season to season. The daily 
twenty-four-hour motion of the earth on its axis, which is 
called its rotation, should not be confused with its yearly 
motion around the sun, which is called its revolution. 

Louise Brown 



ALL NIGHT WITH THE STARS 

Have you ever spent a night out-of-doors, an entire 
night in a pine grove perhaps, or did you prefer an open 
field? Was it on a mountain-top, or just outside your own 
tent door? Of course you did not sleep, not all night. 
You watched the stars get brighter as the sky darkened. 
You talked awhile with your friends, and then you all 
decided to try to sleep. Perhaps you were awake some- 
time when the others were asleep. You were glad that 
your companions were there, but you liked being the only 
one awake. The sky seemed never so thick with stars. 
Some very bright ones were shining on you. A gentle wind 
stirred the branches and a few birds called. Did you hear 
the laugh of the loon or the vigorous whistle of the whip- 
poor-will in the distance, or some nearer bird singing 
quietly a sleepy night song? Often for a long time all was 
silence. Perhaps you crept softly away to see what it 
would be like to be all alone in that silence. //y 

It was July, I suppose, or August, when the ground is 
warm. I hope that the bumps and hollows where you lay 
just fitted your body so that you loved lying close to the 
earth and soon lost consciousness of yourself, becoming a 
part of the great quiet earth. Perhaps however you did 
not find it possible to sleep that first night under the sky. 
You only rested and thought, and dozed a bit. Then you 
tried it again another night and yet another, until you 

5 



became so accustomed to being close to nature that you 

easily slept long hours and rested as never before in your 

life. 
// 

I am going to ask you to spend a night out-of-doors 
with me, although I have not chosen August but October 
for my night. No, do not shiver and decline my invitation. 
There are warm nights in October and my pile of brush 
is high. We shall have a fire all night on our camping 
ground. I have chosen a field on a high hill although I 
love the "pine groves too, with the stars shining between 
the branches and the moonlight making bright spots on 
the ground below. But to-night I want to see the whole 
sky. I do not want to be shut in even by the tops of pine 
trees. So here in the soft places between the rocks I have 
made our beds. The spreading juniper was a tempting 
mattress, but I tried it and found it not so comfortable as 
it looks. Here we gathered blueberries in August, so many 
and so big that we sighed to realize that we could not pos- 
sibly pick them all. There are pine trees and white birch 
on the hill, under which I have collected knots of wood that 
burn long and give much heat. Come! The trail is easy, 
and it is almost sunset. Let us go ! 



# -& ^r 



The sun is going down there in the distance. How lovely 
the whole sky is, aflame with color, east reflecting west, and 
the earth itself suffused in the soft glow ! I am glad that 
there are a few clouds in the sky, they add so much to the 
sunset ; there are not enough to hide our stars to-night. 

6 



Odd to realize that people further west are not yet having 
sunset and that halfway around is sunrise! East of us 
the sun has already set, and further east across the 
Atlantic, midnight has come, as it will be coming here. 
Where does the sun go? If telegrams should come from 
people all the world around while we sit here, we should 
know. "The sun that left your sky is still here," reads 
one from a town a little w T est of us, "but gone now," comes 
the word in a few T minutes. "Here still," says another. 
"Rising here," is the word from the other side of the globe. 
We would conclude that the sun is traveling around the 
earth from east to w^est. It will rise again for us over 
there, almost opposite w 7 here it is setting this night. 

Someone tells a story of an imagined conversation 
among some Mayflies. Now T Mayflies live but a few T hours. 
The oldest Mayfly had watched the sun getting nearer and 
nearer the western horizon. He concluded that it w T ould 
surely pass out of sight, not in his lifetime perhaps, but 
during the lives of his children. Alarmed at the prospect 
of so terrible a calamity as a world without a sun, he calls 
all the young Mayflies to him and tells what he in his long 
life has seen. What are Mayflies going to do when there 
is no longer any sunlight to dance in? Surely there is 
coming an end to the race of Mayflies ! But nevertheless, 
the story concludes, the sun rose again the next morning. 
And so it has always, as long as human beings have lived 
on this earth. 

But now the stars are coming out. That's Vega nearly 
overhead, and Alt air lower towards the south. Deneb in 
the top of the Cross shows betw r een. That bright one in 

7 



the northwest is Arcturus. See how different its color is 
from Vega's. It is quite reddish, while Vega is bluish-white 
and Alt air yellow. There's another in the southeast, 
Fomalhaut. It is one of the stars navigators use because 
all through the fall it attracts attention to the south, it is 
so bright and so alone. Garrett Serviss says of it : 
"Flaming above the southern horizon on a chilly autumn 
night, it attracts a degree of attention that would not be 
paid to it, if it occupied a place in some richer region of 
the sky. It is like a distant watch-fire gleaming in the 
midst of a lonely prairie." 1 Five bright stars ! Did you 
see them when you slept out-of-doors last summer? They 
were all in the sky in the early evening, — all but Fomal- 
haut. We have to wait until fall to see that. 

Now we can see fainter stars. There's one on each side 
of Alt air. The whole Cross shows with Deneb at the top 
and a faint one at the foot between Vega and Altair. 
There's the Big Dipper with its bent handle, low west of 
north, the two stars in its bowl pointing as always to the 
North Star. The W of Cassiopeia, the Queen, is on the 
other side of the North Star in the northeast. Those four 
in the east are the Great Square of Pegasus, the Winged 
Horse; and there in the w T est near Arcturus are five stars 
of Bootes, the Herdsman, forming a kite-shaped figure 
with Arcturus in the tail. Do you see the winding row of 
the stars in the Dragon between the two Dippers, with 
four stars, two quite bright, near Vega, making its head? 
Above Arcturus and further west see the Northern Crown. 

i "Astronomy with the Naked Eye," p. 132. 



NORTH 



EAST 



VV 

Cassiopeia 




North Star 



OVERHEAD 



Big Dipper 





• Vega 



The Cross 



Northern 
HI Crown 



WEST 



e Fomalhaut 



The Archer 



SOUTH 



Map 1 

Conspicuous groups of stars in the sky at 6:30 October 19, latitude 
42° N. (Hold the map over your head with the top to the north.) 



Take my field glass. How many can you count? I see 
seven without the glass. The brightest is called the "Gem" 
of the Crown. Those four so conspicuous west of south 
are in the Archer. At the right, you see his bow and arrow. 

Those are not clouds overhead — it is the Milky Way 
you see. Trace it, from northeast through the W and the 
Cross. There it divides into two streams reaching to the 
southwestern horizon. Vega is well outside it on one side 
and Altair on the edge on the other, Use the field glass 
again, and you will see that numerous stars compose it. 
I am glad that there's no moon to dim its light to-night 
and that w r e are far away from the smoke and lights of 
cities, here alone on the hill-top, where we can see the full 
glory of this "river of the sky." Isn't its soft whiteness 
wonderful against the black sky there where it divides? 
Its irregularity adds to its loveliness. See how dense it is 
in places, and how thin and mistlike elsewhere. 

To-night we have all the sky — north, east, south, and 
west — and not just patches seen between buildings! I 
am going to make a map of what we have seen, and then 
another night at home, perhaps we can find some of these 
stars again. Then let us rest awhile and just enjoy it all. 
But first let us look again to make sure that we shall know 
these stars when we look later. Arc turns, in the kite- 
shaped figure in the northwest, and the Northern Crown, 
near ; Vega overhead, and Altair with one star on each side, 
towards the south, the Northern Cross between ; the Great 
Square of Pegasus in the east, Fomalhaut alone in the 
southeast, and the four-sided figure of the Archer west of 
south; the Big Dipper a little west of north, and Cassio- 

11 



peia's Won the other side in the northeast. Now let us 
light the fire and rest, /fr 

* & it & * 

Midnight! Have the hours gone so fast? Where are 
our stars? You've found the Big Dipper and the North 
Star? Then at least we know our directions. But where 
are the Northern Cross, and Vega, and Altair? There in 
the northwest not very far from where the sun set. They 
were overhead in the early evening. The Big Dipper is 
east of north, and how much higher the W is, almost over- 
head ! The Great Square is further west, and Fomalhaut 
has changed from southeast to southwest. Arcturus has 
gone, and the Archer with the bow and arrow. What 
bright new stars in the east ! That's Orion, the Hunter. 
What a magnificent set of stars ! I don't wonder people 
know Orion when they do not know any other star-group. 
Three bright stars make his belt, two his shoulders, and 
two bright ones his knees. Faint ones — can you see 
three? — make his head, three more below his belt, his sword, 
and a row of faint ones at the left are in his shield with 
which he protects himself from the Bull. That bright 
star higher than Orion is the eye of the Bull, and the tiny 
group of faint ones like a little dipper are the famous 
Pleiades in the shoulder of the Bull. Some people think 
that winter is the only time when Orion can be seen, but 
here it is in our midnight sky in October. 

The names of these stars are rather hard to remember, 
but no worse than the names of some of my human friends. 

12 



Big Dipper 



Pollux 

• Castor 

EAST /^\Capella 

Betelgeuze ^^^ 



Orion 




The Dragon 




Va 



K 



Cassiopeia 



OVERHEAD 



Rigel 



Aldebaran 

The Pleiades 




The Great Square 
in 

Pegasus 



Altair 



SOUTH 



Forrvalhaut 



Map 2 
Conspicuous groups of stars in the sky at 11:30 p.m. October 19. 
Compare with Map 1. 



I like to know them because I sec them all winter ; almost 
every clear night I look for them. The one in the Bull's 
•eye is Aldebaran. Contrast its color with that of Bigel 
in Orion's right knee. Aldebaran is reddish. Rigel is 
bluish-white like Vega. Betelgeuze in Orion's left shoulder 
is very red — redder than Aldebaran. How many Pleiades 
can you count? Yes, a field glass shows more. There are 
thousands visible through a telescope. Do you remember 
what Tennyson says in Locksley Hall? 

"Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, 
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly toward the west, 
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, 
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." 

But Orion is not "sloping toward the west" now, is it? 
Evidently this scene was not at midnight in October. 
Perhaps it was in January. 

There further to the east are other bright stars that 
have risen during the evening. That yellow one in a five- 
sided figure is Capella, the Goat Star, and further north 
are Castor and Pollux in the Twins. Our sky has now 
more bright stars than it had earlier. Then there were 
five: Arcturus, Vega, Altair, Deneb, and Fomalhaut. We 
have lost Arcturus and gained six: Albebaran, Rigel, 
Betelgeuze, Capella, Castor, and Pollux, so that now there 
are ten. We'll make a map of this midnight sky, and then 
as the weeks go by in November, December, and January, 
we will watch the east for these same stars. We shall not 
have to wait until midnight to see them. At eight, in mid- 
December, they will all be in the sky. 

15 



But what are the stars doing during the night? Let us 
watch awhile, and better still, let us photograph them. 
Then we shall know surely how they go. I will put my 
camera on this rock back of the pine trees where it will be 
shielded from the light of our camp fire. We'll point it 
at the North Star and expose for four or five hours. Now 
before we sleep, let us watch awhile. Orion's belt is over 
a tree-top a little south of east. The top of the Cross is 
just over Mr. Smith's chimney in the northwest, and the 
bowl of the Dipper is resting on that hill in the north. 
Let us watch these three. ... I am always going to have 
a window facing east if I can. Then if I am awake in the 
night, I can see the new stars rising. You could soon 
learn to tell the time of night by the stars, couldn't you? 
Next October if you see Orion just where it is now, you'll 
know that it is midnight. I wonder what new stars will 
be coming into sight this morning while we sleep. And do 
you suppose that Arcturus, which we saw setting, will rise 
before the sun? 

The stars I've been watching have moved already. The 
Cross which was over the top of the chimney in the north- 
west has certainly gone down to the right. Orion is higher 
now on the other side of the tree. The Dipper is higher 
too. You do not have to watch long to see them move, 
do you? The Cross will soon be gone and the Square will 
follow. We can make a good guess where Orion will be at 
five in the morning. Lucky they do not change the figures 
they form. The Cross stays a Cross and the Dipper a 
Dipper. It would be dreadfully confusing if they did not, 

16 



for how would we recognize a star apart from its group? 
Let us pile on the brush now and really sleep. 



ft & ft & ft 



It's not yet four. You could sleep longer, but if you're 
awake . . . No, I didn't sleep. It was too beautiful to 
miss. I was afraid I might never again have a chance like 
this. I have always wanted to do it, but if it had not been 
for your companionship I should not have had the courage 
to try. I was never up all night before. Once I went out 
at two to see a comet and I loved the quiet city at that 
hour. But I was never on a hill-top under the sky all 
night. I shall never be the same person again. It's not 
only the stars, the beauty and wonder of it all, not only 
the silence — it's the chance to get acquainted with your- 
self. I came across these lines the other day from George 
Herbert's "Church Porch": 

"By all means use sometimes to be alone. 
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. 
Dare to look in thy chest; for 'tis thine own: 
And tumble up and down what thou find'st there." 

That is what I have been doing this morning. 

Yes, that's Capella overhead now. It was in the east at 
midnight. Orion is further south than it was. The Big 
Dipper has swung around, bowl first, to the northeast. 
The Cross has set and the Great Square is just setting. 
Castor and Pollux have moved up from the east. 

I don't wonder that you exclaim at what you see there 

17 



lower in the east ! I was just waiting for you to see them ! 
Aren't they wonderful? They're not stars — they are 
planets. 1 Those two so very close together are Mars and 
Saturn. Mars is the red one. You couldn't get the moon 
in between them ! That very bright one higher to the right 
is Jupiter, and the other one just above the horizon is 
Venus. Did you ever see such a brilliant group ! We 
certainly are in luck to be here this morning. I've been 
watching them rise, one after the other, and I almost called 
a t ou when I first saw Mars and Saturn just above the hori- 
zon. I thought at first that they were distant lights. 
Then I read my Monthly Evening Shy Map 2 and found 
out that four planets are in the morning sky now. No, I 
didn't know. You see planets are not like the stars, fixed 
in groups. They won't be here next October. That's why 
we're in luck. I guessed that the red one was Mars for 
Mars is always red, and I rather thought that the brightest 
one must be Jupiter. Saturn is really very much further 
from us than Mars, although they are side by side in the 
sky. An interesting thing is going to happen. Because 
Mars is nearer the sun than Saturn, it moves faster among 
the stars from night to night. A few mornings ago it 
was nearer Jupiter. It is going to get nearer and nearer 
Saturn and then pass it. It will be closest on the morning 
of the twenty-fourth, so close that it will take a good look 
to see that the two are not one. I am going to be out 
that morning to see. 



i The description following applies only to the morning of October 
20, 1919. 

2 Leon Barritt, 150 Nassau Street, New York. 10 cents per copy. 

18 



Big Dipper 



The Lion 




Regulus 



EAST 



Dragon 



North Star 



The Great Squan 




TheW 

Cassiopeia 



OVERHEAD 



Capella 



Castor 



Pollux 




WEST 



••'•' The Pleiades 

• Aldebaran 



Betelgeuze 



Proeyon 




Sirius 



SOUTH 



Map 3 
Conspicuous groups of stars in the sky at 3:30 p.m. October 19. 
Compare with Map 2. 



How did I know that they arc not stars? Well, the only 
stars in this part of the sky are in Leo, the Lion. You see 
that fairly bright one between Saturn and Jupiter? That 
is liegulus. It would show up better if there were not such 
brilliant planets near. With those faint stars above, it 
forms a question-mark turned the wrong way, or a sickle. 
That is the head of the Lion and those three stars lower 
making a right triangle are his tail. Now these stars in 
Leo will be here at this time every October but the planets 
will not. 1 The planets move among the stars and are found 
sometimes in one group and sometimes in another. So if 
you know the stars well, and see a strange bright one not 
on the maps in the books, you know that it is a planet. 
o But please come here where you can see the southern sky 
better. It is almost as beautiful as the eastern. That 
very bright star at the right of Orion and lower is Sirius, 
the Big Dog Star. It is the brightest star in the sky 
although some of the planets are brighter. That other 
bright one making a fine big triangle with Betelgeuze in 
Orion's shoulder and Sirius is the Little Dog Star, 
Procyon. You can see Sirius and Procyon all the winter 
but you will not see Leo in the early evening until Febru- 
ary. Leo is really a spring constellation, because although 
we can see it at eight o'clock in the evening in the middle 
of February, it is higher and more conspicuous through- 



i In October, 1920, Saturn and Jupiter will still be in Leo but the 
more rapidly moving Venus and Mars will have left. In 1921, Mars 
and Venus will be back in Leo with Saturn in October, and in 1922 
none of the four will be there that month. Mars returns in October, 
1923, and Venus is the only one of the four in Leo in October, 1924. 

21 



out the spring and early summer. It was in the west last 
July at sunset when we were in camp. 

Let us see how many bright stars are in the sky now: 
Sirius, the Big Dog Star ; Procyon, the Little Dog Star ; 
Capella, the Goat Star; Aldebaran, the Bull's eye; Regu- 
lus, in the Lion; Castor and Pollux in the Heavenly 
Twins ; Betelgeuze and Rigel in Orion. That's nine ! 
We've lost five during the night: Arcturus, Vega, Deneb, 
Altair, and Fomalhaut. There are only two more very 
bright stars that can ever be seen here: Antares in the 
Scorpion, which we see summer evenings and could have 
seen last night had not the hills in the southwest hidden it, 
and Spica in the Virgin, which is too near the sun, I sus- 
pect, for us to see this morning. So in one night we have 
seen what it would take a year of evenings to see. William 
T. Olcott, in "A Field Book of the Stars," gives this easy 
little rhyme to aid in remembering when these stars rise be- 
tween 9 and 9 : 30 o'clock in the evening, except Arcturus, 
which rises at ten o'clock February 1. The number over 
the name of the star tells the month, 1 for January, 2 for 
February, and so on. 

1 
First Regidus gleams on the view. 

2 3 4 

Arcturus, Spica, Vega blue_, 

5 6 

Antares and Altair, 

7 8 9 

The Goat's head. Square^ and Fomalhaut, 

10 11 

Aldebaran, the Belt aglow^ 

12 
Then Sirius most fair. 
22 




Star Trails 
• Result of exposing a camera to stars near the North Star for five 
hours. The shortest arc is the trail made by the North Star. 



Thus it is in December that Sirius will be seen rising be- 
tween 9 and 9: 30 o'clock, and Regulus in January. But 
we are ahead of the calendar for we have seen them this 
October night. Fourteen bright stars and four planets ! 
It has been worth a night. 

Let us see what our camera has done. It takes but a 
few minutes to develop the film and I brought the materials 
along. See what's showing! No stars at all, just streaks 
of light ! Each star makes a trail of light on the film as 
it moves across the sky. All these arcs curve about a 
point in the center. In tw T enty-four hours each star would 
make a complete circle if sunlight did not interfere. We 
might have gotten half-circles at least had w T e started 
earlier. That shortest arc is made by the North Star. 
Some people think the North Star does not move. Shake- 
speare's "Julius Caesar" refers to it as the only one in all of 
"true-fix'd and resting quality" which alone "doth hold his 
place." But you can see it move. If you see it over a 
steeple and come back in a few hours to exactly the same 
spot, you will find that it has moved to one side. It sweeps 
through a circle over four moon's breadths in diameter, 
but that is so small a circle compared with those of other 
stars that very few ever notice that its position changes 
at all. Stars that are further from the Pole, as the point 
about which these northern stars seem to move is called, 
make larger circles, as the film shows, and hence their 
motion in a given time is more evident. 

The Dippers can swing around the Pole without going 
below the horizon, but stars further from the Pole rise and 
set. We have seen the Cross and the Great Square set 

25 



and Orion and the Dogs rise, but the Dippers have been 
in the sky all night. Tennyson refers to this in "The 
Ancient Sage" : 

"Earth's dark forehead flings athwart the heavens 
Her shadow crown'd with stars — and yonder — out 
To northward — some that never set, but pass 
From sight and night to lose themselves in day." 

Day is coming and all the stars will be lost to us, but 
they will still be in the sky, some setting, others rising, and 
those in the north endlessly circling around the Pole. By 
noon the Big Dipper will be almost overhead, and by four 
in the afternoon, it will be bowl downward in the north- 
west, but by 6 : 30 in the evening it will be back where we 
saw it last night, a little west of north. 



ft ft ik ft ft 



The great sky seems to turn, car lying all the stars, the 
sun, the moon — every heavenly body — around the earth in 
twenty- four hours. Of course people used to wonder what 
made the sun set, and the stars and moon too, and rise 
again the next day. They quite naturally believed that 
the great dome of the sky revolved around the earth, carry- 
ing all these bodies with it. They thought the earth a 
fixed body, as it seems to be, in the center of the universe — 
a very important body since, as they supposed, all the 
others were made for the enjoyment of human beings and 
paid obeisance by their twenty-four-hour motion around it. 

But there came a time when a thoughtful man questioned 

26 



OVERHEAD 



Oct. 20 Noon 




North Star 
+ 




Oct. 20,6:30 A. M 



Oct. 20,6:30 P. M. 



/ Oct. 19 Midnight 



NORTHERN HORIZON 



Map 5 

Showing how the Big Dipper changes its position in twenty-four 
hours. 



this belief. He argued in this manner. There are millions 
of stars. If they move around the earth as they seem to 
do they must have to go very fast. Those that are further 
from the earth than others would have to go faster to get 
around in twenty-four hours for they all get back in the 
same positions in reference to one another. It seems un- 
likely that all these heavenly bodies should go so fast 
around our little earth. We can figure out just how fast 
the} 7 would have to go. The nearest star is 25 millions of 
millions of miles away. (How this was discovered is a long 
and interesting story.) But this is only the radius of the 
circle in which it must move to go around the earth. 
Geometry tells us that the circumference of a circle can 
be found approximately by multiplying the radius by 6%. 
This gives us over 157 millions of millions of miles the 
nearest star must travel in 24 hours ! Dividing by 24 and 
again by 60 to find out how far it must go in one minute, 
we have nearly 109,000 millions of miles, the distance cov- 
ered in only one minute ! More distant stars would have 
to go faster, and even our sun would have to travel about 
a half-million miles in one minute to get around the earth 
in one day. Try to imagine what traveling millions of 
miles in one minute means ! 

I think we shall agree with Copernicus 1 that it is not 
likely that the sun and stars move around the earth as 
they seem to do. To Copernicus another explanation of 
their apparent motion seemed more sensible. No doubt 
you have heard of it. It is more likely, he argued, that 

1 Born in Poland 1473. See "Pioneers of Science" by Oliver Lodge, 
Chapter 1. 

29 



the little earth turns on an axis, making all the stars, the 
sun, etc., seem to move around it. When we watched the 
sun sink below the horizon last night, we did not think that 
it was not moving, but that our earth was moving the other 
way carrying us with it, through the night of the earth's 
great shadow, and back toward the sunlight again. And 
as we watched new stars coming all night into our sky, we 
little realized that they were not moving up above our 
horizon, but that the earth was making our horizon move 
down so that it no longer hid them from our view. 

Yet it must seem, to anyone who thinks seriously about 
it, highly difficult to believe that the earth moves. It seems 
so stable. We are not jarred by any motion, or ever aware 
of standing upside down when it has turned halfway 
around. No wonder that thoughtful people in the six- 
teenth century said that Copernicus' idea was ridiculous — 
the earth could not move. Yet they could not explain how 
the stars could go so fast around the earth ! It must be 
either one way or the other: either the earth is still and 
the sky goes around it, or the earth moves and this makes 
the sky seem to go around. 

We can illustrate it in this way. You, Alice, are the 
sun and I will be the earth. The other girls form a circle 
around me, farther off than Alice. You are the stars. 
Now I will stand still and you all move around me. It is 
da}^time for I am facing Alice, the sun. The sunlight blots 
out the stars. Now the sun is setting. Alice is passing 
back of me. I can see the stars, but they too are moving 
across my sky, some setting and others rising, until the 
sun comes up again. That is the way it seems to be. We 

30 



saw the sun set last night and the stars follow. But there's 

another explanation. You girls and Alice stand still, and 
I, the earth, will turn. It is day, for I am facing the sun, 
but as I turn, the sun (Alice) seems to be moving the other 
way. Now it has gone and I cannot see it but I see the 
stars. As I turn on to my first position, the stars seem 
to move across my sky. There, I see Alice again. The 
sun is rising. It is quite clear that the rotation of the 
earth does explain the apparent motion of sun and stars, 
and certainly it is a simpler matter for one small body to 
move than for millions of other larger ones at tremendous 
distances to travel around it. 

Actual proof that the earth does indeed move came long 
after the time of Copernicus. 1 Later, too, came the 
answers to the natural objections of people to the idea of 
the earth's moving. Gravity holds us on, and grips the 
air too. Cushioned in this air, we turn with the earth, 
quite unaware of its motion, "up" being always over our 
heads and "down" beneath our feet. I have been trying 
this night as I have sat here, to imagine this earth ball 
that seems to me so big and so still, hanging in space, with 
stars all around it in every direction, itself a mere dot in 
an infinite universe. 



ft ^v ^r # ft 



But see what has happened ! The earth has turned east- 
ward and brought us in sight of the thin waning moon. 2 



i See "StarlancT by Sir Robert Ball, pp. 46-56. 
2 Morning of October 20, 19-20. 

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How lovely it is in this dim light that precedes the sun ! 
There too is Arcturus very low in the northeast. You 
remember that we wondered if we would see it rise 
when we saw it set in the northwest last night. The stars 
are getting faint now. Soon only the brightest will show. 
Good-bye, Aldebaran, and Orion with your Dogs — we shall 
welcome you earlier in the evening in December. We shall 
know you w T hen we see you again and we'll think of this 
morning. Good-bye, Leo, the sunlight is blotting you out. 
We shall remember all day that you are still in the sky 
making your way westward although we see you not. 
Keep some of those brilliant planets for us to see when you 
mount above the eastern horizon at a more convenient 
hour next February. Soon we shall lose sight of the moon. 
It is too thin a crescent for us to watch it in the daytime 
preceding the sun across the sky, showing it the way to 
the west. 

Welcome, Sun ! This is indeed a new day ! 



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